Wierd

It was 1996 all over again at the Showbox last night as I attended the reunion show of one of my favorite bands of that period, Carissa’s Wierd. The “slow-core” “chamber rock” stylists performed to their usual heartbreaking best and it was charming to see so many young people wandering around misty-eyed as they recalled their youth from a decade earlier.

I felt like it was a real opportunity for lots of kids to feel kind of old for the first of many times in their lives.

Earlier in the evening, I had gone to the Delegate Reception at this year’s American Federation of Teachers convention at a downtown hotel; it warmed my heart to be in a room drinking (free! Your dues payments at work!) beer with a couple thousand unionized teachers, and it reminded me how we’re all still grad students at heart when it comes to free food, of which there was plenty.

I had some time to kill before the show, so I found myself in a place that turns into a self-anointed speakeasy at night but early in the evening, is pretty much like a regular bar, where I got to have another out-of-context experience with a former student, an experience that seemed well in keeping with the evening’s theme of past events in new settings.

Opening the show was another band I liked for a little while, Aveo, whose career tanked, I’ll bet, when in turned out they have the same name as a Chevrolet subcompact car, yet another reminder that forces beyond our control probably exert way more control over things than we realize, although saying so does seem to suggest that we’re contradicting ourselves in some way.

But I guess that paradoxical quality really was the message of the night: the past is the present; the future is the now; what once was returns again; the one thing we can surely know is that we don’t know nothing.